Ren-Chang Ching was a Chinese botanist and pteridologist who made significant collections of plants from
Mongolia to
Yunnan. He was born in
Wujin, Jiangsu, and studied botany and forestry at the
University of Nanjing. On graduating in 1925 he taught at Southeastern University and from 1927 was Head of the Botany Section,
Nanjing Museum. Here he switched his focus from trees to
pteridophytes, which thereafter became his speciality. At this time, there were no experts on Chinese ferns in China and no single fern specimen was correctly identified in the small herbarium just started in Beijing. Ching started to correspond with pteridologists in the West (
H. Christ,
C. Christensen,
W. R. Maxon and
E. Copeland), thereby creating a basic library on Asiatic ferns for reference. In addition he started to make extensive collections of ferns, particularly from the provinces south of the Yangtze, but he knew he needed to see the type specimens in western herbaria. Learning western languages so he could access the many Chinese herbarium specimens held in western institutions, Ching visited Europe following the Fifth International Botanical Congress in 1930. In Copenhagen, he consulted the fern expert
Carl Christensen, and then worked at the
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, for more than a year. He again visited Copenhagen in 1932 and then Vienna, Prague and other European herbaria before returning to China later that year, where he joined the Fan Memorial Institute of Biology (later
Academia Sinica), Beijing. in 1933, Ching was one those who founded the Chinese Botanical Society, and soon afterwards founded the
Mountain Lu Botanical Garden in
Jiujiang. When the Japanese invaded China in 1937, Ching fled to Kunming (Yunnan Province), where, working at Yunnan University, he helped to found the
Lijiang Botanical Station, where he was director until 1945. Ching remained in Yunnan until 1949, when he returned to Beijing to head the Taxonomic Section in the Institute of Botany, Academia Sinica, where his energies were largely focussed on education and forestry. However, his interest in ferns continued for the rest of his life, with him finally publishing more than 140 papers and books on them. Major works were
Icones Filicum Sinicarum (1930-1958) and the series
Studies of Chinese Ferns. He was also the principal author of the fern treatments in
Flora Republicae Popularis Sinicae. (This section is essentially a rewrite of the corresponding JSTOR article.) ==Some plants he authored==